Canada's Year of Fire

You can't live anywhere in North America and not be aware of how bad the wildfires in Canada were this year. Smoke from the fires affected almost every part of the continent and even darkened the skies as far afield as Greenland. In Canada, several towns and cities burned and 200,000 people were evacuated during the summer. In the previous worst year for fires, 10 million acres burned; this year the toll was 45,000,000 million acres. 

The New York Times has published a long article that looks at how the fires affected people across the country. It's the best article I've seen yet on the subject and I'm linking to it here with a paywall-free link from my subscription.

One of the key points of the article is that wildfires aren't occurring just in distant forests; they're burning in places where many people live, in what's called the "wildfire urban interface" in both Canada and the United States.

When the town Slave Lake in Alberta burned in 2011, it felt like a small-scale throwback to the great fires that engulfed Chicago and San Francisco — 400 homes destroyed and more than 700 people left homeless. When Fort McMurray burned in 2016, it looked like another step-change — not a remote town deep in the boreal wilderness but a major, modern, industrial tar-sands boomtown and a rapid evacuation of 90,000. But each has been followed by so many successive examples that they are now, distressingly, something like an annual event: Santa Rosa and Paradise in Northern California, Boulder in Colorado, Lytton in British Columbia and Lahaina in Maui, where a brush fire swept through the old Hawaiian capital, killing nearly 100 people. It was the deadliest American wildfire in more than a century.

Each of these is, to some degree, a climate story, but each is also a story about aggressive residential development into what is called the “wildland-urban interface,” or WUI. Today, more than a third of American homes are in the WUI, as are half of Canadian ones. “It is a beautiful place to live, until it goes feral,” Vaillant writes in “Fire Weather.” “When the WUI burns, it does not burn like a forest fire or a house fire, it burns like Hell.”

You may think that just because you live in a big city, that wildfires aren't a concern, but the Canadian fires this summer had a global impact, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than the annual output of more than half of the world's countries combined.

And next year may be worse.